


They Get in the Way

by calculatingMinutiae



Series: The Ghost of Glimwood Tangle [11]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: (Nothing too serious but still tagging for it), Body Horror, Chronic Illness, Chronic Pain, Gen, Ghost!Allister, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Modern Era, Victorian era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:33:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22619443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calculatingMinutiae/pseuds/calculatingMinutiae
Summary: Stow-on-side, 2017.Ever since his encounter with Cara Liss, he's figured out that life could be a little bit brighter, if only he were soulless enough to let it be and take it.Allister has some bad memories. Bea has a weird dream.
Relationships: Mimikkyu | Mimikyu & Onion | Allister, Onion | Allister & Gangar | Gengar, Onion | Allister & Poplar | Opal, Onion | Allister & Saitou | Bea
Series: The Ghost of Glimwood Tangle [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1576204
Comments: 5
Kudos: 65





	They Get in the Way

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the way I'd envisioned writing this chapter, but I'm not certain that's a good or a bad thing. It has kind of been a week.
> 
> [Cover Art](https://2sp00ky.tumblr.com/post/190723077445/i-dont-know-what-instagram-looks-like)
> 
> [Now with rad fanart](https://skyistheground.tumblr.com/post/190766791627/they-get-in-the-way-calculatingminutiae-pocket)
> 
> Also, as it turns out, it completely slipped my mind that I don't actually know whether or not Allister and Bea are canonically adoptive siblings but they sure are in TGoGT [and that is primarily thanks to Sketchione so give them some love.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21458860/chapters/51138286)

If you listen closely, you can feel every joint in your corporeal form creak like an old water wheel in a windstorm. You can't stand it. Your body never was all that, say,  _ robust  _ or  _ solid, _ maybe even  _ more than just barely functional  _ to begin with, but ever since Cara Liss showed you that you don't actually  _ have _ to suffer through in your...  _ condition _ , alone, you have been hyper-aware of your fatigue. You felt so good, and things were so fun and so free, it was a high like none you'd ever known; but, of course, it comes with a price. Everything pleasant comes with a price, so it seems, and this one is not even yours to pay.

You simply refuse to ask anyone if you can  _ drain some of their life away _ (Cara told you that's not quite how it works; " _ it's more like you're extracting the inputs and products of cellular respiration with minimal tissue damage, especially nutrients in transit from the blood. Ghost types seem particularly good at keeping their hosts alive to drain another day, with sufficient age and experience.... _ " At a point, you couldn't keep at attention anymore, words certainly hitting your ears only to bounce off as you'd rock back and forth on your feet trying not to think about the fuzzy feeling building up in your head.) It's parasitic. You've learned about parasites in the Tangle, mostly as you've been trying to keep the Phantump colonies safe and free of leaf-rot. They take, and take, and do nothing but harm the living.

You refuse to be a parasite stuck to your friends, or colleagues, or your little patchwork family _. _ You will not be any more of a burden on their shoulders than you already are. You swear this to yourself, in spite of your corporation bleeding into the air around the edges, in spite of an intense need (but not want; too much to do, see, experience,  _ please don't take the world away again you just got back _ ) to rest. You are resolute.

You also, in times like these, find yourself confined to your bed while you try to  _ literally  _ keep it together. 

Bea offered you a bedroom in her little place in Stow-on-side not long before you officially became siblings, and you've felt obligated to at least  _ try _ to use it. You don't sleep most nights (part of you is scared you won't wake again in your family's lifetime) but it's a very good, very human pattern to get into. It provides a certain rhythm that you can't get just from exploring at night and watching as the sun rises, giving you a rough understanding of what eight hours looks like and, more importantly, keeping you from having to dematerialize. These nights, since it is so recently that you've discovered you  _ can, _ you try to stay tangible as much as possible. It makes you feel tied to this place. It reminds you that you are still  _ real _ .

You roll the bead at the center of your ivory charm idly between your fingers, staring up at the ceiling.

You have many vague less-than-fond memories of staring up at the Scheele's green wallpaper plastered around your mother’s old bedroom, bright and glistening as it may have been with the morning mist rolling in on coastal Stow-on-side, and the drowsy pitter-pattering long-drawn dregs of your thoughts always adding up to you  _ hating _ the color. It was supposed to be something bright and fashionable, something to keep your spirits high, but the intricate patterns of green leaves only served to remind you how you  _ couldn't _ leave. It's so beautiful, out there, in the forest where the Fae roam free or on the cliffside where the sunshine is always intense overhead. You'd swear that you'd seen them before, that they really  _ did _ exist, but you'd been constrained to your bed so long you were starting to forget just how blue the sky can be on a crisp morning, or how the trade winds whip loose dust about the ruins and turn the atmosphere a brilliant orange with sandstone. Blood red drained from your working memory just as its drained from your face, no golden bands of sunlight entering in through your windows. You couldn't even see the violet of your own eyes anymore without a glance at your reflection in your father's spectacles. He hardly came to see you, towards the end.

It's just green. This powdery matte sort of green, and the gray haze of the fog spilling out from your brain, then your eyes, and over the hillside glen.

You spent most of your time in life sick and bedridden with Some-Thing-or-Another. Nobody ever bothered to clarify what was wrong with you, of course, though you recall that your father tried. He tried so many times, with so many tonics of odd and foul-tasting things that you can’t quite fully recall, but none of them could tell you why your head was spinning, or you felt like your insides were staging a violent coup against you and were perpetually about to overthrow you for control, or why you could barely climb the stairs without having to stop and sit down shortly thereafter. In fact, most of them pretty regularly made you feel  _ worse _ , so you’d never drink as much as they asked you to.

Nobody could tell you why your body could never quite tell what temperature it should be, making you so damn  _ cold _ all of the time, you’d come to think it was simply that the world itself was nigh frozen-over. You told yourself that it had always been that way, that you could hear the thrum of your heartbeat softly cup over your ears, as though a screen put up to remind you of how  _ dangerous _ it is, out there, and  _ really _ now, why would you want to be an unknown sort of miserable when you  _ could _ be a familiar one, the kind of miserable you can build a tolerance to, the kind you can pretend you’ll someday push your way past?

Your memories of your father are more like flashes and sensations, of scalding hands pulling a blanket over your shoulder, of a gentle voice reading you to sleep, of a racket coming from the kitchen as dishes hastily clinked together. With enough time to think of it, it’s occurred to you that he thought you hadn’t noticed. The withering disease. That first it’s a friend’s classmate’s brother’s cousin, and then suddenly it’s made its way to Hammerlocke, and then to the neighbors of neighbors in Stow-on-side. Consumption flared and burned out through population centers in Galar, and with your immune system as compromised as it is, there is no  _ fixing it. _ There is no  _ better. _ You are stuck, in this bright-green room, and the only way out is to be carried feet-first in a box of linen. 

You didn’t know much about it, then, other than to be terrified of when it would come for you.

You don’t know much about it now, either, other than that you cheated it of its prize. 

Here, in the present, you stare up at your ceiling, feeling weak, and aching, and nauseous. You don’t know when you started crying, but you know you can’t sleep through the night. 

You can’t.

You just.  _ Can’t. _

Your finger lightly presses into the button on Mimikyu’s pokeball, and she pops out with a cheerful little chirp.

_ Mimi-kyu! _

You smile slightly, blinded by the spectral globs of your own tears. You still haven’t gotten the hang of dismissing them, instead more concerned with hugging the little pokemon as she quickly comes to realize that you haven’t called her to your side to play. 

A shadowy hand tentatively pats your shoulder, then squeezes you tight as it can without crushing you completely. 

_ What’s going on? _

“‘S nothin’, Mimi, ‘m just… l-long, day, right?” you force yourself to laugh, trying to be endearing, but when reality sets in you’re only concerned you’re going to throw up. 

_ Right. Long day, playing in the rain and spinning around on the sinisteacups in the gym….  _

“Yeah. ….”

She looks up at you, with her real eyes, and you don’t need to hear it to know she’s simply disappointed,  _ tsk, tsk, tsk. _

You idly smooth over the fabric with one hand. You can tell that it’s soft, so soft, and that it is Good. You can only imagine that it’s also warm, possibly cozy, the way Opal told you hot chocolate tastes. You wish you could taste hot chocolate. Or anything, for that matter. 

Mimi has escaped out from under your grasp while you weren’t looking, and you can’t wonder just how long you’ve been patting the air before she pounces onto your head. Your sobs devolve into a fit of giggles as she hangs by your bangs in a plain game of ‘peek-a-boo’ you  _ know _ she is bound, as always, to win. 

Then you start coughing.

* * *

Your trainer, wonderful as he is, is  _ kind of _ a stubborn idiot. You let go of him when you hear him start to cough, dark gray spectral mass slipping between his fingers until he reflexively wipes it on his shoulder instead. Your own shadowy form fits neatly under your cloth disguise, perfectly-groomed, and it still escapes you why he is not so keen to do the same. Humans are always so finicky about keeping their insides in, considering they tend to be red and gooshy and not nearly so makeshift and malleable as ghosts always are; they never really reconfigure themselves and their forms to fit the situation the way you and your kind can and must.

He isn’t quite ghostly  _ or _ human that way, your Allister. He looks human, acts human, insists he  _ is, still human, _ but all of the blood and guts and such are made of the same kind of matter as you. He never shifts. He never transforms, and he never listens to you when you insist that if he would just  _ loosen his grip, just a little, he wouldn’t spend half as much energy or feel a quarter as horrible. _ Instead, he just gawks at you as though you’d told him Opal’s moved to Kalos, and it makes things worse. 

You have stopped offering suggestions he’s not ready to hear. 

Instead, your lovely trainer keeps anchored to this plane, and this reality, and this  _ city _ with an iron grip. For all the physical strength he lacks and lacked, he’s more than made up for it in resolve. Lonely little Allister has pushed himself to the brink for as long as you’ve known him, which just-so-happens to be all but about a week of your life. 

And what a weird week it was. 

It was the week you hatched, then you saw a nice lady with a stern expression who marched you right back to the Daycare Center on Route Five, something about “this isn’t my ralts”, and an “I’m sorry miss but we genuinely do not know where it came from.” Then you found yourself recalled into a pokeball, only to wake up in Miss Opal’s house.

You  _ love _ Miss Opal’s house. You love the little pink cottage with its little pink carpet, the shiinotic patterns embroidered in lace doilies, the place oozing with charm and  _ class _ . Finally, somewhere that appreciates your  _ class. _

And there are also plenty of shadowy areas to hide and ankles to periodically attack! 

You stayed with her, as her pokemon, but not for very long. She didn’t teach you to  _ fight, _ per se, so much as she showed you how great it is to hurl yourself into a pile of fabric scraps or to adorn your disguise with stray buttons or pieces of ribbon when it becomes too tattered from all of your play-roughhousing. Your “tail” may not actually be attached to your body, but you love to chase it nonetheless, and it is very,  _ very _ tiring work. Doubly so to fetch the tiny colorful springs she’d hurl across the cottage to keep you busy and away from the hem of the dress she’d been sewing.

Sewing, and pacing, anything to keep her hands busy. In the few days you’d known Miss Opal, back then, you’d thought her a rather nervous lady. You know now that she isn’t, not in the slightest, but she used to look at you with a gaze bordering mournful. You weren’t certain whether you should feel insulted or not, but before you could decide she always looked away. 

You suppose you understand the shockwave of those writhing nerves, now. 

Allister is coughing so hard he’s starting to come undone, again, and he can’t hide it from you anymore. It isn’t so severe that it can’t be reversed, no, but he needs somebody. He needs  _ you, _ and fast, and you offer him your claws. 

“Hmm? Y-You okay, Mimi?” He tilts his head, struggling through uneven breaths he is not choosing to take. 

_ Take my hand? _ You say, though you should not have needed to.

“... I-I know what you’re doing. ‘M fine, Mimi, p-promise.”

_ You’re an awful liar, Allister, _ you sigh, looking directly at him as he watches you grab his forearm.  _ Haven’t you done this enough to know that you really aren’t? _

“Been worse.” He has the nerve to shrug in your general direction. 

You shoot him an exasperated look, and he giggles a bit beneath his mask. 

Only it devolves into coughing again, and then he is silent. Shaken.

You hop off of the bed, and dash down the hall. You do not turn back to see if he watches you go.

* * *

Bea rubs her eyes, bleary and unaccustomed to being pummeled by an overgrown stuffed toy at three in the morning. “Hmm, now what’s this then? Alli?”

Mimi jumps in her direct path, pink satin ribbon fluttering as she falls. 

“Alright, alright, I’m coming… really, can’t it wait ‘til morning? I have half a mind to—”

Leaning heavily on Allister’s doorway, Bea blinks to register the sight. 

“To….”

Allister is laying on his bed, curled up tight as he can be, hands over his head and mask tossed aside. 

She has  _ never _ seen him without his mask, and can only assume that the dark and viscous substance lining its inside is....

Genger is sitting at the head of the bed, watching over him, glaring at the first sign of motion.

_ Mi, Mimikyu! Kyuuuu. _

Gengar nods, brow still furrowed, still looking at Bea with a dash of its best menace. It’s all performative, of course. The first step she takes is an outrage, but as she draws near Gengar lets the facade drop into an expression nothing short of concern. 

_ Geng, Gengar. Gar? _

“I… I’m sorry, I don’t understand you, how can I help?”

The shade takes her hand, then one of Allister’s, drawing them closer to one another.

“N-No… no!” Allister attempts to yank his hand back. In the process, he splits his arm at the elbow like one does an overstretched taffy, yet more of those shadowy spectral particles sloughing off and sliding to land on the bed from both sides of the wound. 

Bea can only stare. She has found herself in a very,  _ very _ strange nightmare. 

“D-Don’t. Don’t, say anything, I-I know.” 

Allister, for perhaps the first time in Bea’s recollection, sounds sure of himself. Then again, confidence is easier to feign with a lie you’re trying to tell yourself. “I’m sorry.”

“What.”

“I, ‘m sorry for, for making a mm-mess of th, things and for not. I’m not helpful. I wasn’t helpful at the gym, today, a-and you always do, so much and ....”

“Allister, can I sit with you?”

“O… kay?”

Bea seats herself at the edge of the bed, trying not to stare too much as she gently cups Allister’s apparently-severed arm with both hands. He, unmasked but with bangs thoroughly obscuring most of his face, bites his lip and looks down at the floor.

“Did you know this would happen?”

“Huh?”

“You’re awful quiet, for having your arm torn off, seems like the kind of thing you’d be worried about something awful in the light.”

“Oh… n. Not exactly.”

Bea huffs, then bites the inside of her cheek.  _ Impatience will get you nowhere. _

“Why not, then?”

“B-Because,” he sniffles, and cringes,  _ hard. _ “I know I can just. S-Stick it back on. ‘M not. Like, you anymore. I-I mean, I was never,  _ like you _ but ....”

“Allister.”

He holds the breaths he doesn’t need, looking up to Gengar for guidance. The shade only looks to Bea. 

“I’m not human.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I mean, I’m not. Made of human? Anymore? I don’t know, it’s.”  _ A headache, standing out under the beating sun, Cara Liss spouting on and on about her notes, notes, notes. Surely it wouldn’t be hard to ask, but that doesn’t mean any of it will make a lick of sense to you. _ “Complicated….”

Bea takes a deep breath, finding her inner balance. Screaming in combined terror and frustration can wait.

“You shouldn’t be able to do that. You’d have to be a…” she looks up at Gengar, who can only articulate the empathy and outright pity he feels for the children through an unsteady frown. “... ghost.”

“Yeah,” Allister nods, as though it’s entirely unremarkable. 

“... We can talk about this in the morning. How. How do we put you back together?”

“I was tryin’na tell him I can handle it….”

“And then your  _ arm came off, Alli. _ ”

“I’m not gonna ask you to fix this. I-It’s my, self and my fault I can. Can figure it out or, get the consequence.”

“Do I need to call Opal?”

“....”

Allister sighs. He finally gives in and leans on Bea’s shoulder. 

“I-I only found out I can do it, real recently. Like the ghost pokemon, taking… taking energy from living ones, but with. …,”

“Ah.” Bea nods, not understanding anything. 

“I don’t want to do that.”

“You’ve been crying.”   
  
“I got… scared.”   
  
“Of? What’s gonna scare you when you’re not afraid of your  _ arm falling off _ , really?”

“...,”

“... Too much?” she shifts, backing up to get a look at his face. Violet eyes meet her own. 

“Of  _ fading away, _ ” he shivers, the tears creeping back into his voice. “And not, knowing, or-or having it feel, different or be anything, s- _ special _ and not having anybody notice at all, and having all the things to see and things to do and times to have just, just  _ gone, _ after I already wasted it once,,”

Bea holds him as tight as she can, and the tears do not stop. Mimikyu headbutts him, then nuzzles into his side, Gengar rubbing his back in gentle circles, and Allister at the epicenter cannot stop himself from breaking down again. Every time he flinches, it hurts. Every time he straightens out his back, gets complacent, and lets himself relax just a little bit, it hurts. Every time it hurts, he looks over his shoulder, never quite knowing when the last sting will come. Though he lacks physical pain receptors, the profound sense that  _ something is not right  _ becomes a signal that things are still  _ happening, _ positive or negative, good or bad, and that in and of itself is enough. It must be enough. It must. Be….

Bea. 

“I’m sorry,” he brings himself to say, after a stretch of time no shorter than half an hour and not quite long enough for the sun to rise. 

“It’s alright,” says Bea, along with a good half of a yawn. 

“Why are you still. Here?” 

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I-It’s late, you need sleep, I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t call me out here,” she shakes her head, a sing-songy tone of voice. “Mimikyu did. And Mimikyu still seems worried, to me. I happen to agree.”

“....”   
  
Gengar and Allister work together to shove his arm back into its proper socket, primarily by pressing it against the joint as hard as their combined strengths will let them.

Bea shakes her head. 

“Do you know how they treat a dislocated joint?”

“...?”

“In first aid, you don’t. If you’re not a doctor, you could really hurt someone’s nerves by pushing the wrong way and do more harm than good, but I think…,” she eyes the black sludge in the corner of his mouth, noting how it matches the strands of particles on each end of the wound. “I think that for a ghost, it’ll be alright. But you can’t just force it to work for you. Mimikyu, could you bring me the roll of ace wrap from my dresser?”

“She doesn’t know what that is.”

“It’s like…  _ ribbon,  _ but the kind I wear.”

Mimikyu nods, running off and back in record time. Bea smirks a bit, self-satisfied.

“What’s that for, anyway?”

“This? Is to make sure that you don’t overwork the joint. Stretching it is okay, but if you move it too much it might just pop right back out again.” Bea nods, trying off a wrap around his elbow for support. It’s not how treating an amputated limb should work, no, but most of her mind is assured she is having a  _ very _ odd dream, at the moment, and how much of anything “works” is a little more malleable than just up to interpretation. 

“... Thank you,” Allister mumbles under his breath. 

Rather than wait for a response, he suddenly decides to headbutt under her chin softly, leaning on her completely. 

Bea smiles. 

“Hey, c’mon now. Would it help if you and your pokemon stay in my room tonight?”

“... Please.”

“Alright.”

“... Thank you.”

“No need, Alli. You’re my brother, what kind of sister would I be to make you stay here while you’re having an off-night?”

“For staying, I mean.”

Bea blinks, so tempted to ask him to  _ elaborate, explain, _ but she has a sinking feeling she already knows. If he would have fallen to pieces completely, for better or worse she would have been there. She would have been holding him.

She is too tired to process this, tonight, holding his uninjured hand as tight as she can and tugging him along. Rather than rational thought or an articulate and calm response, she snaps to her first instinct. An instinct, it so happens, is to say:

“Of course.” 

**Author's Note:**

> "Take my eyes, take them aside/  
> Take my face and desecrate/  
> Take my hands, they'll understand/  
> Take my heart, pull it apart/  
> And take my brains, they get in the way"
> 
> \- Mother Mother, Body
> 
> And, because this is fairly obscure in hindsight: there is something a bit... off, about Allister's memories of the 1800s. This is not the last time it will come up.


End file.
